Podcasting

Podcasts are like a kind of aural augmented reality.

I first encountered podcasting back in about 2005 - ipod, hence podcasting - as part of my previous life in the edtech world. It was difficult to do, and most ‘shows’ weren’t terribly good. I never really got into it, as a producer. But in recent years, professional broadcasters have entered the scene, raising production values across the board. The tools for making podcasts have made it possible for the likes of you and me to up our game quite a lot too.

For some of my courses (eg, Intro to Digital Archaeology), I’ve been using an ipad app from anchor.fm which allows me to record audio and rearrange the snippets, add incidental sound and music that is license free, and push the podcast to the major discovery platforms. Other folks I know use Spreaker and no doubt there are other platforms out there for building and promoting polished work.

But even if you used those platforms for their distribution reach, or for their access to free-to-use music and sound effects, you still might want to consider recording your work locally on your own machine with the free and open source sound tool Audacity. Dany Guay-Bélanger, a former public history student here at Carleton, used Audacity and Wordpress to create a podcast series on the problems of archiving video games in a museum context called DeadPlay.

I may not have made many podcasts, but ultimately, they all come down to good storytelling. Terry O’Reilly’s Under the Influence is an excellent example of good storytelling married to a strong structure. Listen to an Under the Influence episode. Every one has the same basic structure. There’s an opening hook that is itself a little gem of story telling with its own internal structure (setup, rising conflict, climax, resolution) that sets the overall theme for the episode. There’s an opening sound/music clip reminding us that we’re listening to ‘Under the Influence.’ The theme is explained in a bit more detail. Then there are three or four more stories more directly germane to that overall theme, and then a final summary that reminds us how the different stories illustrate the theme, with a clever twist tying it all back to the opening hook.

1. Why not collaborate with someone on this? Download and install Audacity.
2. Follow this lesson by Brandon Walsh at The Programming Historian to become familiar with how Audacity works.
3. Record two - five minutes around the theme of ‘things that have driven me nuts about learning digital history’.
4. Have one person collate those recordings into a single file with interstitial music.
5. Have one person write and record an opening hook - it doesn’t have to be very long or complex.
6. Pull it all together into a single sound file.